Marvin Miller, 1917-2012

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The man who saved baseball from itself, and from obsolescence, passed away today at 95.

There is no more important figure in the history of the game than Marvin Miller. He changed more of baseball, and more of it for the better, than anyone else. To the wider world, he was one of the last people who demonstrated why the power of a union remained important no matter how much globalist utopian bluster has come to cloud the issue down through the decades. Before Miller took over the Major League Baseball Players Association in 1966, and contrary to all of the weaponized golden-age nostalgia that so encrusts the game, baseball was on its way to becoming a lovely little relic of the distant past. It was coming off a stretch in which the Yankees won, or nearly won, every single year. (Which is why all the arguments of what free agency has done to the game's "competitive balance" is so much malarkey, and I'd like to thank Joe Biden for making that word cool again.) When he finally stepped down, the players were richer, the game infinitely more interesting and entertaining, and the noxious old reserve system that bound a player to a team in perpetuity was as dead as A.G. Spaulding. There was nothing Marvin Miller ever did that didn't make the game better for the people who follow it.

There are those who believe that Miller "went too far" or refused to "compromise" who fail to recognize the fact that baseball management never has gotten over the end of the reserve system, and that it never has ceased its efforts to bring back de facto what Miller helped to end de jure. That is what the collusion scandal of the 1980s was about. That was what the cancellation of the World Series in 1994 was all about. That has been the basis of every argument advanced by management ever since Miller closed the system down. The reserve system was an offense to an advanced democracy, and Miller's great gift was to see it as all of a piece with every effort organized money ever has made to demolish the power of the people who do the actual work. He attached the Players Association to the history of trade unionism in America and he did so at a time in which the power of that movement was waning everywhere else. His great achievement with the player's union was to get a group of the most selfish individual contractors in the history of the universe to think of themselves as a union, and to act as one. Having been around baseball players for a good portion of my career, I can tell you that this is nothing short of a miracle.

He is not in the Baseball Hall Of Fame because the voting process is completely corrupt and needs to be blown up and rebuilt from scratch. (My prediction is that they will vote him in posthumously, just to be nasty about it, because Miller already told them not to bother.) That there are still people who think what he did was destructive to the game is probably the best measure of all the good he did. He had a positive genius for making all the right enemies. And, at the very least, in an era in which we are fighting at every level against the suffocating embrace of plutocracy, Marvin Miller created out of a group of millionaires a union that actually worked. He should be celebrated for nothing more than that.